Complex PTSD Treatment and Therapy for Childhood Trauma

What is Complex PTSD?

Complex trauma results from chronic, repeated, or prolonged exposure to threatening events from which a person cannot escape. These events can occur early in life and can have a long-term effects.

Some examples of threatening events that can result in Complex Trauma are:

• Abuse, neglect, and/or sexual abuse as a child

• Basic needs insecurity (for example: food, clothing, shelter)

• Medical neglect

• Being chronically shamed, rejected, and/or misunderstood

• Growing up with parents with borderline or narcissistic traits

• Growing up with emotionally immature parents

• Having a parent with untreated mental illness

• Being parentified as a child

• Covert incest (also known as emotional incest)

• Experiencing family separation

• Being exposed to prolonged domestic violence

• Experiencing chronic discrimination

• Exposure to substance misuse in the home

• Religious trauma

• Being threatened with violence

• Exposure to violence in the community

What are the symptoms of childhood trauma in adulthood?

There are a number of symptoms that overlap between PTSD and CPTSD, but they differ from each other in that someone with CPTSD will tend to experience the following:

• emotional flashbacks

• toxic shame

• self-abandonment

• a vicious inner critic

• social anxiety

Other CPTSD symptoms include:

• Hypervigilance

• Affect dysregulation (i.e. depression, anxiety, hopelessness)

• Guilt, shame, and poor self worth

• Fear of abandonment and rejection sensitivity

• Re-experiencing symptoms (i.e. emotional flashbacks, intrusive thoughts)

• Avoidance symptoms (i.e. isolation, substance use, distracting from emotions)

• Dissociative symptoms (i.e. difficulty concentrating, not remembering portions of your life)

How I help clients with CPTSD

When exploring complex trauma, I help clients identify and process what emotional, physical, and psychological needs did not get met, as well as experiences that did happen. These experiences can involve emotional, psychological, or physical acts that occurred in their lifetime.

To help my clients through this process, I use a variety of therapeutic styles as needed, including parts work and somatic, or bottom-up, techniques.

• Parts Work helps people identify, get to know and understand different parts of themselves that were created through chronic trauma or stress. The goal is to build collaboration between these parts and unburden the parts that hold trauma.

• Somatic, or bottom-up, techniques help clients slowly develop an awareness of body sensations into feeling states in their body, and the goal is to complete the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses that we can get stuck in due to trauma.

Your present doesn't have to be dictated by your past.

Therapy for CPTSD can help you move forward.

If this sounds like your experience, you don't have to untangle it alone.